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genetics

Anti-vaccine activists would have us believe that autism is the result of some sort of undefined, or scary sounding toxicity and should be cured by a gluten-free diet and detoxification typically conducted by a profiteering quack. However, the real scientific evidence points to genetics and brain development, meaning that no one develops autism or turns autistic, but is born this way and will fall at some point along the spectrum when the condition can be diagnosed. Recently, another study provided additional evidence for this theory by comparing how modified skin cell cultures taken from those with autism, reverted into stem cells, and induced to grow into micro brains developed to skin cells from their non-autistic parents, subjected to the same treatment. Right away, the researchers noted an over-abundance of inhibitory neurons which created the roadblocks to forming necessary connections for sensory and social input processing.

While this isn’t confirmation that this is in fact what causes autism, it’s a substantial step toward identifying the culprits. It also narrowed down the gene responsible and gave the researchers a good idea for how to control its expression. While some pop sci outlets trumpet this as work we can use to develop a cure for autism, I’m not so sure that it’s so simple. After all, autism isn’t a structural disorder in which an excess of inhibitory neurons blocks important functions and pills or even gene therapy would suddenly turn autistic individuals into neuro-typical ones. With their brains affected from birth, their lives have been built around their neurons compensating for all the neurotransmitter dead ends. It would take many years for their brains to re-wire themselves and fashion a new personality. And while those with severe autism would greatly benefit, would this be a desired, or even an ethical treatment for high functioning autistic people?

If autism shapes how you see the world and you have always had it, yes, it can make life really confusing and difficult. But when one learns to overcome, to recognize one’s problems and find coping mechanisms, the journey has made this person who he or she is today. It’s tempting, in the words of autism quacks to “fix” them, but considering how integral autism has been to how they became who they are, the “fix” in question would mean undoing a lifetime of learning, and in some way undoing what they are today for the ability to better process certain stimuli, social interactions, and better emotional coping skills. Again, for low functioning autistic people, there are arguments in favor of the benefits outweighing the risk, but for those who’ve learned to see this condition as a part of who they are and can easily function on their own, even benefiting a little from some of its positive side effects, being “cured” won’t always be the best choice…

According to a widely reported paper by accomplished molecular geneticist Jerry Crabtree, the human species is getting ever less intelligent because our society removed the selective drives to nurture intelligence and get rid of mutations that can make us dumber. This is not a new idea by any means, in fact it’s been a science fiction trope for many years and had it’s own movie to remind us of the gloom and doom that awaits us if we don’t hit the books: Idiocracy. Crabtree’s addition to it revolves around some 5,000 genes he identified as playing a role in intelligence by analyzing the genetic roots of certain types of mental retardation. Then, he posits that because we tend to live in large, generally supportive communities, we don’t have to be very smart to get to a reproductive age and have plenty of offspring. Should mutations that make us duller rear their ugly heads in the next few thousand years, there’s no selective pressure to weed them out because the now dumber future humans will still be able to survive and reproduce.

Evolution does have its downsides, true, but Crabtree ignores two major issues with his idea of humanity’s evolutionary trajectory. The first is that he ignores beneficial mutations and that just two or three negative mutations won’t necessarily stunt our brains. Geneticists who reviewed his paper and decided to comment say that Crabtree’s gloom and doom just isn’t warranted by the evidence he presents, and that his statistical analysis leaves a lot to be desired. The second big issue, one that I haven’t yet seen addressed, is that Crabtree doesn’t seem to have any working definition of intelligence. These are not the days of eugenicists deluding themselves about their genetic superiority to all life on Earth and most scientifically literate people know that survival of the fittest wasn’t Darwin’s description of natural selection, but a catchphrase created by Herbert Spencer. Natural selection is the survival of the good enough in a particular environment, so we could well argue that as long as we’re smart enough to survive and reproduce, we’re fine.

This means that Crabtree’s description of us being intellectual inferiors of our ancient ancestors is at best, irrelevant and at worst pointless. However, it’s also very telling because it fits so well with the typical assessment of modern societies by eugenicists. They look at the great names in history, both scientific and creative, and wonder where our geniuses are. But they forget that we do have plenty of modern polymaths and brilliant scientists and that in Newton’s day, the typical person was illiterate and had no idea that there was such a thing as gravity or optics and really couldn’t be bothered to give less of a damn. Also, how do we define genius anyway? With an IQ test? We know those only measure certain pattern recognition and logic skills and anyone could learn how to score highly on them with enough practice. You can practice test your way to be the next Mensa member so you can talk about being in Mensa and how high your IQ scores were, which in my experience tend to be the predominant activities of Mensa members. But they are members of an organization created to guide us dullards to a better tomorrow after all…

But if IQ scores are a woefully incomplete measure of intelligence, what isn’t? Depends on who’s doing the measuring and by what metric. One of the most commonly cited factoids from those in agreement with Crabtree is how much time is being spent on Facebook an watching reality TV instead of reading the classics and inventing warp drives or whatnot. But is what we usually tend to call book smarts necessary for survival? What we consider to be trivial knowledge for children today was once considered the realm of brilliant, highly educated nobles. Wouldn’t that make us smarter than our ancestors because we’ve been able to parse the knowledge they accumulated to find the most useful and important theories and ideas, disseminate them to billions, and make things they couldn’t have even imagined in their day? How would Aristotle react to a computer? What would Hannibal think of a GPS? Would the deleterious genetic changes Crabtree sees as an unwelcome probability hamper our ability to run a society, and if so, how?

Without knowing how he views intelligence and how he measures it, all we have is an ominous warning and one that single-mindedly focuses only on potential negatives rather than entertain potential positives alongside them, and making conclusions about their impact on a somewhat nebulous concept which isn’t defined enough to support such conclusions. In fact, the jury is still out on how much intelligence is nature and how much is nurture, especially when we consider a number of failed experiments with designer babies who were supposed to be born geniuses. We can look at families of people considered to be very intelligent and note that they tend to have smart kids. But are the kids smart because their parents are smart or because they’re driven to learn by parents who greatly value academics? We don’t know, but to evolution, all that matters is that these kids secure a mate and reproduce. To look for selection’s role beyond that seems more like an exercise in confirmation bias than a scientific investigation into the origins of human intelligence. That research is much more complex and elaborate than gene counting…

A while ago, I wrote about anti-science attitudes on the far left being just as strong as on the far right, with only a few strains of them being called out because the anti-science on the far left is seldom as organized as creationism and religious morality movements. For an example of this anti-sceince, I followed up with a post on a popular article boiling over with pretentious New Age drivel and compared it to creationist rhetoric for a little study of just how unsettlingly similar the tactics of modern woo-meisters and fundamentalist zealots can be when they’re proselytizing. Now, thanks to a post from UK science blogger Martin Robbins, we can have a look at another example of anti-science on the far left, a theme it treats in much the same way that the far right treats global warming. I’m talking about genetically modified foods, the research avenue despised by a whole lot of environmental activists with such fervor that they destroy experimental crops, threaten researchers, and hold rallies protesting what they ironically call "Frankenfoods" in reference to a creature killed not by a callous scientist who thought human life had no value, but by angry and ignorant villagers who saw it as a threat.

First, let’s address the elephant in the room straight away. Genetically modified foods hold potential for some very real abuse by companies who will own the patents on them and there are certain companies that engage in very unethical business practices when it comes to selling GM crops, just like there are companies that will engage in unethical practices in any industry and put profit over safety, customers, and basic decency. But the actions of the companies that do or would abuse GM crop technology don’t mean that modifying crops to have greater yield or be more resistant to certain pests in their environment is invalid. We’ve been modifying staple foods for millennia, steering the evolution of the crop species we farm by artificial selection and now, we have the tools to directly inject the changes we want. But surely that means we could inject something horrible into the crops’ genomes, something that could kill us all or cause cancer, right? We ran the same risk by tweaking how crops grow in the past because we had no way to analyze what they really did during our manipulation of their environment and couldn’t guarantee they wouldn’t spawn a dangerous toxin. Of course we could have an expert try to address the environmental activists’ concerns about this. Oh wait, no, no we can’t.

… Nor did [the protestors at Rothamsted] want to listen to any scientists: an attempt by researcher Jules Bristow to ask for a right of reply was met with “we’ve heard it all before” after which she was loudly shushed. (After I’d left a few people came over for more constructive chats, but they seem to have been very much in the minority.) Debate was unwelcome for the most part. [S]cientists were just another part of the [GMO] conspiracy, and placards took absolute positions like “Nature does it better” — try telling that to plague victims, or anyone with wisdom teeth.

Of course GM foods are not a panacea for hunger in the developing world, that’s a far more complex issue in the first place, but they have their uses and research into their creation and safety should happen without the threat of Luddite vandals demolishing the research specimens just like the ignorant villagers killed a bizarre creature they didn’t understand and which, with the right safeguards and care, may have offered new ideas to defeating death were it to be handled by experts. Do we know everything about how GMOs reproduce or how safe they are? No. But we don’t know everything there is to know about the organic food that so many virulently anti-GMO protesters eagerly inhale at the dinner table and recommend as the ultimate goal of all farming. We need to continue experimenting with GM crops to find answers to the difficult questions that anti-GMO crowds raise. But of course these activists don’t really care about the answers. They’re too busy projecting their fear of profit-minded corporate malfeasance into the GM debate, just like global warming denialists are busy trying to project their fear of socialism and international legal bodies into climate models…

When it comes to biology, everyone can name the key molecule for life as we know it. Scientists mine it for all sorts of tantalizing clues about our past and possible future while creationists effectively worship it as proof of a deity as some sort of programmer of all living things. But what if I and Ed Yong were to tell you that DNA isn’t the only molecule capable of passing down hereditary information and serving as a key mechanism for basic evolutionary changes? In fact, there’s a whole class of so-called XNA molecules in which deoxyribose can be easily replaced with a whole host of other sugars like cyclohexane, therose, hexose, and glycol to create new kinds of hereditary molecules called CaNA, TNA, HNA, and GNA, respectively. The X in XNA is basically just a placeholder for any sugar that will form a stable helix to contain the nucleic acids to be read. Considering that so many sugars can step up to bat and create a double helix enabling living things to develop and evolve, it’s actually kind of a mystery as to why deoxyribose won out at the dawn of time and prompts one to wonder if we would still be around with say, an ANA which used arabinose instead of the DNA we know and love today?

Now, oddly, the answer seems to be yes because they function the same way and there’s no reason why we couldn’t exist with such a substitution to our cellular chemistry. It’s too late now of course because a life form using an XNA wouldn’t be able to replicate with a DNA utilizing organism. In fact, the researcher who identified these possible permutations of hereditary molecules wants to use them to safeguard us from synthetic life, making sure that it could still be hearty enough to survive competition from bacteria that have been around for billions of years while being unable to actually interfere with our current ecosystem. And as Ed points out, the divergence doesn’t stop there as some scientists are adding even more bases to hereditary molecules to try and coax synthetic life forms into producing very unusual amino acids that would be of use to us. Now, this is all obviously pretty cool because this is quite literally tinkering with the foundations of life, both as we know it, and as we think we might know it, but what can it say about the future and the implications of this work? A very straightforward application could be in astrobiology and the probes sent to other worlds could be instructed to detect a wide array of sugars used in XNAs in soil samples, hopefully indicating some alien biota.

But there’s a potential for a different application. Today, we can engineer fairly harmless viruses which deliver small bits of interfering RNA to shut down gene expression in certain disorders, halting their progression to make them easier to treat. One of the ultimate possibilities of this siRNA technology is to keep cancer tumors in stasis, though considering the recent findings that each tumor may house more than ten different strains of harmful genetic anomalies, we need to figure out how to effectively customize them to attack all those different harmful genes first. It’s a tall order to be sure, but the important thing is that we have a plan and there’s a lot of research into this type of genetic engineering underway. Ultimately, this could even open to door to modifying our own gene signaling to drastically improve our quality of life with age, and perhaps even increase life span by manipulating the biology complicit in making us weaker and more prone to death. Nature doesn’t have the expiration date for an organism stamped into its genome which makes it much harder to delay death, but we know that after a while, the repair of wear and tear slows and damage continues to build up until we get weak enough to be taken out by something that might not have killed us if we were younger or a vital organ starts to fail after accumulating too much damage to continue working as it is. A thorough understanding of how genes and gene expression work can help us find ways to repair or even reverse all that damage…

For as long as we’ve known about genomes, we’ve been trying to link just about everything we do to a certain sequence of nucleobases, often with mixed results. But even though the most our genes can offer us are an incomplete, basic idea of what may be going on with our bodies and clues about their evolutionary history, it’s not discouraging some researchers into looking at genetic differences in different cultures. For example, what could be the role of OXTR, a gene that acts as a receptor for neurotransmitters triggered by social interaction, in a more formal and tight lipped Korean culture, vs. how it plays out in the behavior of more vent and gossip- tolerant Americans? Since the G variety of OXTR generally tends to be associated with deeper social bonding, if a culture tends to clam up, one would think the people who live in it have fewer versions of this gene, right?

Well, not really, if you go by a recent survey published in PNAS. It’s not that there’s a shortage of the G variety of the OXTR gene, but it’s that those with the G type that tend to be the most hesitant to talk about problems or seek help in Korea, while Americans with the same gene type tended to be more open and willing to consult others. The explanation for the finding is that since the Korean culture is more formal and reserved, opening up could be taken a sign of weakness or a lack of good social graces, hence those who want help suppress their natural urges to open up to others. When that restriction is removed, the G types will happily talk about a vexing problem with family and friends. So what exactly did the study find that was new or surprising? It would seem like a survey confirming the obvious, just with a little genetics inserted into it for good measure. But the study’s write-ups are boasting that it’s actually looking at how genetics and culture interact. Take the reaction of neuroscientist Joan Chao about the survey’s implications…

“This [study] is breaking new ground. It’s one of the first to show that cultural norms themselves are environmental factors that interact with genes. That brings together two branches of science that have a long history of separation. We’re making really important and concrete steps toward bridging [gaps between] culture and biological sciences. That’s going to ultimately pay off in our understanding of physical and mental health factors that we all care about.”

Um, far be it from me to heckle the Dr. Chao, but how exactly does this study determine that culture interacts with genomes? If it did, wouldn’t we expect to find the less social A variant of OXTR in Koreans? It anything, it just shows that people who tend to be most concerned about social bonding in a culture which limits it, try to adhere as closely as possible to the dictated norm. The culture itself has no visible effect on the genomes or gene expression, it simply shows how it affects those who are naturally more social, and how some ideas of how we should interact are at odds with our evolutionary and biological inclinations. Why Dr. Chao would say that we now have proof that culture is mutagenic, I don’t know. Sure, culture could influence long-term genetic trends by dictating the rules for reproduction, as it has done for thousands and thousands of years, but that’s something we already knew and study quite extensively. This survey adds practically nothing to what we know about a culture’s effects on those who live by its customs, and declaring otherwise seems to stretch credulity quite a bit more than I’d feel is warranted considering its results.

Usually, when this blog mentions creationists, the emphasis tends to be on fervent Christian fundamentalists like the staff at Answers in Genesis, or on promoters of theistic pseudosciences like the Discovery Institute and the Templeton Foundation. But we shouldn’t forget that Muslim creationists can be just as bad and are in fact noteworthy players in global evolution denialism. In an effort to demonstrate the problems with creationist arguments across the spectrum of faiths, today we’ll be taking a look at a truly odd paper written by Professor Pallacken Abdul Wahid, who has a PhD in agriculture and a passion for armchair theology. According to a few of his musings, the universe is actually a computer program ran by Allah and he intends to demonstrate this concept with such a thorough mangling of genomics, he will literally lead us back to the Garden of Eden in a supposedly scientific paper about the structure and function of chromosomes, and hereditary information.

Ok, we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves here. To properly appreciate Wahid’s attempt at shooting down the modern understanding of biology, we need to start with his arguments. First he says that an organism’s cells all carry the same information but come in different types, something he insists that genetics can’t explain. It’s pretty clear that somebody hasn’t looked up how differentiation happens during an organism’s development. There’s a number of very accessible popular science books and shows which talk about genetic toolkits and how turning certain genes on and off produces an impressive variety of cell types which go on to form organs and body parts. So far, so bad. Then, we’re hit with another terrible argument. Wahid notes that after death, an organism’s genetic code is the same as it was in life, therefore, genetics can’t account for things like life and death. And this already ridiculous argument is made even worse with the following display of ignorance…

Added to that is the failure of the synthetic genome to spring to life. A team of molecular biologists at the J. Craig Venter Institute, U.S., artificially produced the complete genome of an organism [ … ] This is a landmark achievement in biology .. it proved [that a] genome cannot come to life implying that genome is not genetic information. This experimental evidence also confirms that life cannot be produced from non-life.

Talk about not even wrong. Since when has death been genetic? Organisms die when their bodies wear out, not according to a killer gene that determines lifespans. Now, if Wahid tackled the lack of a fixed lifespan limit in our DNA, I could see where he would be able to take this line of reasoning. But just pointing out you’ll find a living organism and its dead counterpart carrying the same genes and considering it a good enough base for stating that genetics can’t explain life or death and therefore, the science behind it is terribly flawed, could only show a total lack of relevant knowledge on the author’s part. That goes double for his argument that if you put together a synthetic genome, this genome will come to life, and if it doesn’t, you’ve disproved abiogenesis. It’s an absurd notion from start to finish because hereditary information is very important in organisms, but so are all the other biological structures they have. DNA by itself is a very long molecule carrying hereditary patterns. It has to be interpreted and its codes translated into proteins. Without machinery for that, a replicated genome is not going to suddenly come to life as Wahid seems to believe it should.

So what does the good doctor make of our chromosomes and the DNA contained within it? That we’re all “bio robots” and the nuclei of our cells get divine programming to carry out daily functions. Just to put this in proper perspective, we have a person who doesn’t know the difference between an organic molecule and a living cell go forth and rule out abiogenesis on the basis of of an experiment in which DNA didn’t get up and do a dance in a test tube, but it’s not too big of a stretch for him to consider that Allah is downloading divine software to the chromosomes in our cells. Talk about having your head in the clouds. And then, just to add to the combination of ignorance and sweeping, wild claims, he decides to throw in the idea that human chromosomes look like a pair of ribs and therefore, when Genesis and the Qu’ran talk about Eve coming from Adam’s rib, it’s really just a metaphor for Allah booting up the first woman’s “biosoftware.” I’m just going to say that if you were to look at an actual micrograph of a chromosome, you would not be thinking of little, floating ribs and leave you to come up with all the ways to count the approximate amount of absurdity in his statements.

Obviously, the world of Dr. Wahid and that of actual biologists are very, very different. It’s a fanciful place where gods download mysterious “biosoftware” into rib-shaped chromosomes and strands of DNA are required to routinely come to life on their own to prove the validity of genomics. It’s also wrong from top to bottom and just begs me to issue kids a warning to stay in school and keep studying for those science tests. Though maybe, pass on Kerala Agricultural University, since they seem to have a given a PhD to someone who clearly doesn’t know how to use it or even how to do some very simple research for a public paper.

Science reporter Nicholas Wade just published a book which boasts that his insights into the evolution of the human predisposition to supernatural beliefs offer some sort of new or one of a kind explanation for why we have religion in society. To help promote his case, he wrote an article in the New York Times which makes a reference to the hypothetical God gene, some sort of innate component that makes us believe in deities. As you might imagine, the article offers no revelations. We know that religion evolved and stuck around through natural selection and we have a timeline of how it happened. Wade’s truncated account of our transitions from a scattering of hunter-gatherer tribes with shamans leading animistic rituals to modern megachurches, only warrants real attention because he argues that all our religious predispositions must be biological in nature.

If you’ve furrowed your eyebrows and wonder about the validity of that statement, you’re not alone. Yes, we can argue about the nature of our predisposition to religion. However, we do need to learn the tenants of a certain faith. Otherwise, what exactly would we believe? This is one of the biggest problems with arguing that there’s an actual religion gene because so many of our beliefs are highly organized and people are indoctrinated into religion through childhood. More than that, people change their religions and some give it up altogether. So if we accept that Wade is right and there is a genetic nature to our religious belief, we would also have to find an explanation for the current rise in self-professed atheism which involves the religious genes in question being muted through natural selection.

I would even go as far as offer myself as an example against the argument of natural religious tendencies. In my childhood, there was never any emphasis on religion and I grew up without strong religious beliefs. True, there was a time when I sifted through theology because I was exposed to some esoteric ideas and wanted to get a better grip on them but it was an outside stimulus that prompted me to do so, not some innate urge that many theists love to describe. Does this mean I’m some sort of mutant? You could counter my account with a frequently used meme about how many atheists and agnostics start off as theists but you would be using a very contaminated sample because many households in which atheists are born tend to be religious and as the would-be non-theists grow up, they’re bombarded with religious messages until it becomes a part of their culture. Then, they go through a separation process and become non-theists. What happened to the genes in these cases? Did they suddenly deactivate after they made the conscious decision that their religion no longer made sense to them? Clearly, the natural religion argument is fraught with countless problems.

For atheists, it is not a particularly welcome thought that religion evolved because [faith] conferred essential benefits on early human societies and their successors. If religion is a lifebelt, it is hard to portray it as useless.

Pardon me Mr. Wade, but what in the FSM’s noodly appendage are you talking about? Are you trying to do an eye-opening, legitimate scientific exploration of religion or just trying to stick it to the atheists? We know that a society based around the same beliefs would have more social cohesion. We know that civilizations wielding religion as a tool for inspiration and social unity did very well. But we also know that any belief would do that, as long as it’s shared. Religion wasn’t useless when it appeared. This was never an argument advanced by the most prominent atheists out there. Instead, the argument was that today, with a decent grip on the basics of science, we’re hitting the point of diminishing returns when it comes to religion. Antibiotics cure diseases, faith healing offers solace. Holy texts offer navel-gazing ruminations, science offers the chance to find the real answers. And while religions probably won’t go anywhere, the ones we have now are outdated, being slowly replaced by New Age spin-offs and science fiction-esque transhumanism just like Christianity and Islam took their sweet time in replacing pagan traditions over the course of centuries.

Expect Wade’s book to be widely used by anti-atheist crusaders who love to mention how religion has to be a human trait and all atheists do is suppress their originally godly nature. Since the press loves to stir up some sort of big nature vs. nurture debate on religion, even if it has to make one up, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the hypothesis being advocated here to get plenty of time in the spotlight.

Want to work at the University of Akron? Aside from the usual requirements of most employers today, such as a background check, drug tests, credit reports and other pleasantries that put you under the microscope in the name of security, you may also be required to submit a sample of your DNA. One adjunct professor quit as a way to protest the policy and judging by the commentary on the story, there are plenty of employees not happy about this idea either. It’s one thing to endure this level of scrutiny if you want to work for government agencies or run for public office. But teaching on a semester by semester basis? It has all the signs of a cover-your-ass policy gone terribly, terribly awry during a brainstorm by committee and wandering deep into asinine territory.

How exactly does the University of Akron plan to use the DNA of its new employees? Luckily it’s not to provide data to insurance companies which could potentially still get their hands on it thanks to a loophole in HIPAA, but because the University is preparing for a future when genetic material will replace fingerprints…

Laura Martinez Massie, a spokeswoman for Akron, said that the university would not comment on the resignation of Williams. She also said that to date, the university has not collected DNA and has no plans to do so, but is “merely reserving the right to do so.”

Massie said that Akron wants “a safe environment for all of its students and employees” and that “DNA testing was included in the policy because there have been national discussions that [may] indicate that in the future, reliance on fingerprinting will diminish and DNA for criminal identification will be the more prominent technology.” If this happens, she said, [the University of] Akron wants “the flexibility to adopt the new technology if we found it necessary.”

Oh terrific. Is there any other data the University would like to have the right to collect based on discussions in the press? Like retinal scans, access to bank accounts of potential employees so they could monitor and flag suspicious transactions, or maybe RFID chips designed to be implanted into persons of interest to track their movements? Sounds like a ridiculous hyperbole? It is. But so is collecting DNA based on media reports that a fingerprint is no longer considered to be as strong as genetic evidence in court. This is not to mention that as future employers try to collect DNA from their workers, they’re opening serious potential to abuse. Since some experiments have shown that the kind of genetic proof usually held up in court can be faked, managers with a password to the database could use it to frame employees for their crimes. This is a case of CYA that can be not only a PR disaster but a legal one as well.

Here’s a question prompted by the sudden surge of articles in the UK press trying to recycle the idea that it’s only natural to believe in the supernatural and humans are innately born with a belief in a deity. If faith is such a basic part of life, why do we need organized groups which exist solely to indoctrinate their faithful? Why do religious denominations begin indoctrinating new members while they’re still in diapers? And why is it that a Christian group invests a great deal of time, money and effort in spreading their beliefs on college campuses rather than simply trusting nature to take its course and allow humans’ innate beliefs to win over education?

As pointed out by Dr. Bruce Hood, one of the scientists who’s work is being mangled to stir up an instant controversy, people do have a predisposition to accept the religious indoctrinations to which they have the most exposure and it’s thought to be an evolutionary trait to help us work together in large groups and maintain social order. But it’s not the mythical God gene sought by theologists. Rather, it’s the result of our brains looking for causality and logical patterns even if the system we’re trying to logically examine is totally chaotic.

As much as the defenders of the “God is in our nature” idea hate to admit it, the purpose of religious indoctrination is to take advantage of that susceptibility to accepting supernatural causality and frame it in the way the organization says is correct. We could explain why we have so many faiths by the variation in how our “God genes” would work, but if they really affect us enough to shape our worldview and give us so many different answers to the same questions, it seems that the entire construct is useless because it doesn’t achieve any particular goal other than a feeling of something being there. What deity would benefit from crafting a the desire to believe and give us all different instructions as to what to believe and how?

So what really happens is that religious orders propagate by getting to new members as soon as possible, trying to convince anyone in earshot that they’re right. After its members and priests dedicate an entire lifetime to their beliefs, they have a very deep-seeded need to keep new generations adhering to theirs. Otherwise, if they’re wrong and the future generations reject all their teachings in favor of another way to explain complex, existential causality, to what did they devote their whole lives? We’re locked into theistic faiths not just because we need to explain the why’s and how’s we don’t know yet, but because of our need to validate our ideas.

Need proof? Take this example of a religious acolyte saying to Richard Dawkins that he can’t afford to live a lie and demanding that his beliefs are at least given some compassion by the professor. And how about all those constant appeals to the popularity of religion and mentions of how our perfectly sane ancestors were all believers too, summoned by religious writers and bloggers? The longer religious movements exist, the more power they gain, the more they need to remain in charge and the more they need to indoctrinate as soon as possible and for as long as possible. If they’re rejected, all that work and all that effort seems wasted and the believers become angry that they based their lives on something that wasn’t real in the end.

Gentlemen, I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that the chromosome that makes us males, the Y chromosome, is deteriorating and some researchers started pondering a future in which biological males as we know them today, could be extinct. The good news is that males are vital for human reproduction and evolution so the forces of natural selection are going to try and maintain the biological setup for males as long as possible. Overly mutated Y’s are getting kicked out of the gene pool and we’re swapping genes with other chromosomes to maintain our existing distinction between the sexes.

To see why this is happening, we need to go back to the first Y chromosome which was a mutation of a normal chromosome pair that gave us the modern XY setup for males and XX for females. But there’s a bit of a problem with this arrangement. The Y chromosomes couldn’t recombine with the X and speed up the editing of genetic defects, making males slightly more prone to harmful genetic conditions. Even worse, they’re losing hereditary information. Over the last 160 million years, between 800 and 900 perfectly good genes pulled a Houdini. The two things slowing the deterioration are the Y’s ability to fix itself by using the many copies of working genes in its structure when the original gets damaged, and the potential to exchange genes with other chromosomes.

So what happens in the next few million years as the Y chromosome keeps unraveling itself? Natural selection will have to kick in to preserve males. Sexual reproduction produces a much greater variety than asexual lineages which represent an extreme form of inbreeding and leave the species much more vulnerable to genetic disorders and environmental changes. This is why some scientists think that either the Y chromosome will be somehow maintained or new sex chromosomes will develop to keep males around. For humans, there’s another reason to preserve males. We can’t go the way of whiptail lizards. We either reproduce the way we always have, or go extinct as the currently slight imbalance between males and females becomes a vast rift which reduces our population by attrition. And if nature doesn’t come to the rescue, the last women on Earth can justifiably blame men for bringing an end to all of humanity.